In the conventional technology, capacitive touch panels having a curved touch surface have already been proposed (for example, those disclosed in PTL 1).
A conventional method of fabricating a touch panel employs a forming material and a conductive-electroded film manufactured by making, on a substrate film, a conductive electrode region for constituting a touch surface, and fabricates a touch panel by shaping the conductive-electroded film and combining the shaped film and the forming material. An example of the method of shaping a conductive-electroded film and combining the shaped film and a forming material includes the steps of laminating a conductive-electroded film on a flat forming material and shaping the flat laminate into a curved surface by vacuum and pressure forming.
Unfortunately, conventional conductive-electroded films employed for fabricating curved touch panels have posed a problem, that is, breakage of a conductive electrode on a curved part, i.e., extended or contracted part, of the film, which leads to the loss of conductivity in a single electrode region and poor yield of touch panels fabricated.